Although the requirement to create a character came as something of a surprise, Feng Xue was curious, and he had expectations for his golden finger. With a carp-like kip-up, he sprang out of bed, quickly ducked into his little workshop, and deftly cobbled together a one-star cybernetic body.
He admitted it was indeed a bit shabby, but this was only the first test, after all. According to the golden finger’s minimum requirement of a head + four limbs + torso, if he disregarded life-support systems and high-end control systems, he could rely on the [Cheap Goods] trait to push the budget down to 30 credits. By picking out a few parts from the trash he had to process every day, he could put one together.
But if it were a two-star cybernetic body, the material cost would be around 200 credits, and among those materials, quite a few could not be scraped together from the junk pile. He would have to use the brand-new materials Old Man Jiang had given him.
As for a three-star cybernetic body, the penniless Feng Xue had no intention of touching that for the time being.
……
After roughly half an hour of emergency processing, Feng Xue pieced together a robot that utterly did not belong to this era… Yes, this thing was not even comparable to the intelligent robots from before he transmigrated.
Aside from excellent mobility and being light enough, it had almost no merits. But this thing—his golden finger actually accepted it!
[Create character?]
Looking at the robot that had been entered into the character slot, Feng Xue did not hesitate and directly selected Confirm.
The instant the thought fell, he suddenly felt the Source Energy coiled in his mind surge out madly, as though a dam had burst.
A powerful wave of dizziness welled up in him. Before he could even observe the vision that had suddenly gone dim, he smelled a pungent, nauseating stench mixed with the odors of machine oil and fermented matter.
He raised his head. What entered his sight was himself, wearing a tank top, shorts, and cloth shoes; a vast quantity of garbage; plastic bottles and plastic bags of all sizes; all kinds of pipelines; as well as turbid liquid giving off a sour stink, and corpses…
“Corpses?”
Feng Xue abruptly shuddered and wanted to retreat, only to discover that his body could only spin in place and could not take even a single step. Fortunately, the text that appeared abruptly in his field of vision calmed him somewhat:
Entering battlefield: Garbage Dump
Preparation time: 57 seconds
Battlefield intensity: Low
Extraction condition: Reach the extraction point (marked) and remain there for 15 seconds to extract successfully.
Extraction time limit: 6 hours
Extraction failure: Loss of synchronization
Random side quests:
1. Precision Recycling: Collect five items rated 3 stars or above (0/5)
2. Cleanup Master: Kill ten scavengers (0/10)
3. Wasteland Ghost: Complete extraction without engaging in combat.
……
“I strongly suspect this is that loot-shoot-extract job I accepted, but damn it, I haven’t even signed the contract yet! I have no idea what the hell is going on with this crappy game! But speaking of ‘marked’… then the map…”
Relying on his gaming experience, Feng Xue quickly found a translucent minimap in the upper left corner of his vision. As his attention focused on it, the map instantly expanded.
“A circle with a radius of about ten kilometers. There are eight extraction points in total. Looks like they should be the ‘entrances/exits’ of this garbage dump. The closest one is about three kilometers away… But this map doesn’t mark treasure chests… Oh, I’m stupid! Reality doesn’t have interaction restrictions!”
Feng Xue shook his head. Watching the countdown in the preparation time column continue to decrease, he finally pulled himself together and began observing his surroundings.
This place looked like those mountains of trash he had once seen online in his previous life. Less than ten meters away from him lay a corpse that had been dead for who knew how long. When he raised his head, he could see a suffocating dome overhead, supported by thick, towering pillars, densely covered with enormous holes.
“Those pillars look about the same height as the small high-rises from my previous life, around fifty or sixty meters. So this place is actually an underground area?”
As Feng Xue thought this, he suddenly grew a little worried about his original body, even though it was currently in Old Man Jiang’s shop…
The instant Feng Xue thought of his original body, a peculiar sense of detachment suddenly emerged. Feng Xue felt a moment of daze, and then he abruptly returned to his workshop. In his vision, on the screen of his golden finger, a classic first-person perspective from an FPS game appeared before his eyes, while the preparation time countdown still had twenty seconds remaining.
“Oh, so it can be controlled remotely? But controlling it with consciousness is a bit difficult! There isn’t even a controller or anything.” Feng Xue tried switching back and forth several more times. As the number of switches increased, he gradually realized that he had not truly transferred his consciousness into the new body. Instead, with Source Energy as a bridge, he was remotely controlling this body in a VR-like manner. Returning to his flesh body was actually just lowering the VR’s “realism” setting.
“But this kind of feeling should be something only soul-type Source Energy can achieve, right?”
Although Feng Xue did not understand, seeing that the countdown was about to end, he still returned his consciousness to the character’s body. However, he retained a portion of his original body’s perception to ensure that if anything stirred, he could immediately return.
“The side quests ‘Cleanup Master’ and ‘Wasteland Ghost’ conflict with each other. As for Precision Recycling, I can only leave that to chance… I don’t even have a gun on me, so I should make sure I can extract first.”
After one final glance at the three side quests, Feng Xue decisively chose to leave it to fate. At that moment, the preparation time finally reached zero, and he was freed from the state where he could only spin in place and could not move even half a step.
Without looking at the corpse, whose every part worth even a little money had been removed, Feng Xue strode toward the nearest extraction point on the map.
“My reaction speed is still there, but my physical strength is clearly inferior by more than just a bit. My weight is also obviously much lighter. Looks like only the control system is based on my original body. No wonder there were no requirements for the control system when creating a character.”
Feng Xue moved this new body around, estimating his current combat strength in his mind.
Without question, his current flesh-and-blood state had to be the result of his flesh Source Energy. This allowed him, with a body full of one-star cybernetics, to obtain physical capabilities close to those of an ordinary adult. But that weight, conservatively estimated at under thirty kilograms, was clearly the result of the cheap goods cutting corners.
In combat, weight represented more than just the ability to take hits. Just as Antaeus, even with infinite strength, would still be lifted up by Heracles, without sufficient weight, stability was difficult to guarantee.
“With this weight, forget close-quarters brawling. I should just pick up whatever I can and hurry up and extract.”
Feng Xue muttered inwardly, his eyes rapidly sweeping over the surrounding garbage. With the eye he had developed over the past month following Old Man Jiang around collecting trash, he easily noticed that the garbage around him had obvious temporal layering, as though it had just undergone a dumping. This made him frown slightly—
“Garbage day? Could this garbage dump be the one near the Rust Zone? So this isn’t an instance dungeon, but the character was directly teleported to a nearby map?”
Feng Xue pondered this, but ever since he transmigrated, he had been inside Old Jiang’s shop. The farthest he had gone was to the neighboring warehouse to practice shooting, so he had no idea what the outside of the Rust Zone looked like. He could only temporarily suppress this doubt in his heart, while also considering whether he should cover his face or something…
“Mm, I heard Old Man Jiang say that flesh Source Energy can even do cosmetic surgery. I don’t dare try it on my own face, but there shouldn’t be any problem testing it with this character, right?”
“Let the smugglers make the money? Better for proper stores to make it themselves. Putting on airs and insisting on high prices until the goods can’t be sold—is that still capitalism?”
Seriously, if you can ask a question like that, you were probably asleep during high school history class, weren’t you? Ever heard of “milk waves rolling on the Mississippi”?
Smashing it rather than lowering the price—that’s capitalism!
The materials for three-star cybernetic bodies are more or less the same. What determines low-end or high-end is more about craftsmanship, functions, patents, and the like. But the price difference is worlds apart.
For a low-end three-star cybernetic body, the material cost is five hundred. Not counting medical insurance and tariffs, it sells for around eight hundred. Taking labor and assembly-line costs into account, the profit is roughly around two hundred or so, and that’s not even including store operating costs.
For a high-end three-star cybernetic body, the material cost is about the same as the low-end version, eight hundred at most, but the selling price can reach twenty thousand. Even if a high-grade assembly line requires more maintenance costs, the profit is still over fifteen thousand.
Leaving aside the fact that reality is not a game and you can’t infinitely farm minerals, even if materials were infinite, they would definitely all be used to build higher-grade factories! This thing does indeed require a higher initial investment than the low-end version, but once it takes shape, the profits afterward are dozens or hundreds of times greater.
As long as I sell one high-end three-star cybernetic body, the profit is equivalent to selling a hundred low-end three-star ones. Why would I manufacture the low-end kind?
If you have two pieces of land, one factory with a hundredfold profit and one with one-fifth the profit, and the high-profit product has not yet reached saturation, would you build one of each? As for smuggling… How do you know the smugglers don’t have people from the Ge Union authorities?
Or let’s put it another way. I only manufacture high-end goods, smuggle low-end goods from Da Yan, and then use tariffs to suppress Da Yan’s shops. Wouldn’t Da Yan’s cybernetic bodies, in the Ge Union, then only be sellable through smugglers?